It’s an age of unprecedented, staggering technological change. Business models are being transformed, lives are being upended, vast new horizons of possibility opened up. Or something like that. These are all pretty common assertions in modern business/tech journalism and management literature. Then there’s another view, which I heard from author Neal Stephenson in an MIT lecture hall last week. A hundred years from now, he said, we might look back on the late 20th and early 21st century and say, ‘It was an actively creative society. Then the Internet happened and everything got put on hold for a generation.’ Stephenson was clearly trying to be provocative. But he’s not alone in the judgment that we’re not actually living in an era of great innovation
